USS Strike: A list of blog posts and resources

One of the most inspiring things about being involved in the UCU USS pensions strike has been the outpouring of generosity and solidarity that colleagues have demonstrated towards each other online. If you have been following the ucustrike, USSStrike and ExeterOccupy hashtags on Twitter, you will already know what I mean.

Just as emboldening and enlightening are the myriad articles and blog posts which have told the story of this strike from a range of perspectives: from personal posts explaining why individuals do not want to strike, but feel compelled to nevertheless, to Michael Otsuka’s forensic examinations of the USS pension ‘deficit’, to Liz Morrish’s exhortations to use this ‘teachable moment’ to create a vision for a better future in Higher Education.

Here are a few that I have collected. I hope you find them as useful and inspiring as I have.

‘Had employers not reduced their contributions into the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) from an 18.55% level in 1997 — which is higher than what is now claimed the limits of affordability — the scheme would not now be in deficit.’

‘There are some other very positive things have come out of this strike, and more will follow. Perhaps the most conspicuous gain is that there has been a mass recognition of the value of solidarity, together with the sheer joy of strikers finding they do indeed belong to a community.’

‘Like many of my colleagues, when I voted for strike action on this issue of academic pensions, I thought we would be striking for a day or perhaps two in line with previous action. When the announcement of 14 strike days was made, I was devastated. But for those who say they understand our point of view but think we should find another way to make our point, please remember that if we walk away from our union and what they ask of us, we have no-one to protect us or our rights as workers.’

‘What is proposed is a textbook case of the dismantling of a shared good through financialisation. If our pensions are dependent on investment performance, risks that were once shared will be borne by individual USS members.’

‘Some may be cynical about the effectiveness of strikes. While cynicism is understandable given the government’s bulldozing of policies in the face of popular unrest, the alternative is doing nothing and simply accepting disempowerment at the face of a faceless administrative ‘logic’. Obviously it is up to the individual if they choose to support the strike, but what is certain here is that this decision is neither frivolous nor desirable. Resist.’

‘We stand to lose the safety net of a guaranteed pension income (a ‘defined benefit’ pension) and instead our retirement security will depend entirely on the way markets perform. Under the new system, individuals will be left shouldering all the risk and the institutions who pay us will be completely insulated from it.

In my own case, if I pay into my pension for the next 30 years, the change will see me move from an annual retirement income of £22,000 to one that might, if I’m lucky, be worth £10,000 a year.’

‘There are two points worth noting about this pension scheme. First, while employers pay into the scheme, so do we. Second, the pension scheme has already partly been sold out. This means that early career academic workers already get a worse deal in USS. Instead of their pension being based on their final salary at retirement (which would mean more) it is now based on their career average (which would be less). Furthermore, academic workers in post-92 institutions are on a different pension scheme.’

In an article in the Guardian entitled ‘Universities strike blamed on vote by Oxbridge colleges’, Richard Adams reports that “the employers’ backing” of “policies resulting in the harsh cuts” to USS pensions “may have been distorted by giving a number of small, wealthy Oxford and Cambridge colleges the same weight in a crucial survey used to set policy as large universities were given”.

‘Had employers not reduced their contributions into the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) from an 18.55% level in 1997 — which is higher than what is now claimed the limits of affordability — the scheme would not now be in deficit.’

‘[The USS ‘crisis’] is the result of the misrepresentation of the finances of the USS, and the desire of a new breed of university managements to cut their pension liabilities and thereby ease the financing of new buildings and campuses.’

‘Access to Counselling Services by staff employed at Higher Education Institutions in the UK between 2009 and 2015 has risen by 77%, with a rise of 64% of staff referrals to Occupational Health services during the same period, the preliminary findings of a study reveal.’

‘Sidgwick Site at 9am on a Monday morning: this is what real politics looks like. It’s a steadfast, ongoing display of resistance. It’s the acting upon principles that can’t be reconciled with a simple continuation of day to day existence. It’s uncomfortable, it’s challenging. It’s the navigating of boundaries; physical, ideological, and ethical. It is sacrifice.’

‘As a current postgraduate student, I’m supporting my striking lecturers all the way. But I also think it’s crucial that we use these strikes as a wakeup call. What’s being proposed for USS members is no worse than what faces millions of us when we retire – and probably better than many of us. The difference is that, like the frog slowly boiling in a pot of water, we don’t realise it.’

‘In the last two weeks, University College London’s (UCL) academic board and its students’ union have both passed votes of no confidence in the governance of the university. These votes represent the first steps in the rejection and replacement of corporate models of governance—a core pillar of the neoliberal university project, for which UCL has been a flagship.’

‘This strike is not just about pensions and nobody chooses insecurity. The campaign for sustainable careers will continue and will be led by a newly energised and mobilised group of young people. Empowered, as managers would say.’

‘USS’s current troubles, and UUK’s proposed solution, reflect an incoherent attitude toward risk on the part of our employers. Their responsibility for the difficulties we now face can be traced to a consultation in February-March 2017.’

‘As you know the universities are currently enjoying something of a bonanza of money. Everywhere you look universities are building and repairing gleaming new buildings. It’s exciting and all of us love the swish of big glass door and the comfort of a well-padded seat in a lecture theatre. The thinking is that we have to compete on the world market and we need to invest, right? Where is the money coming from? Well a good chunk is coming from the government which passes to us the money that make up your fees – that you will repay later. In addition, universities have also been allowed to expand – student numbers are much much higher than they’ve ever been. That means we need more buildings. They cost money. So there’s something of a financial wheeze here – the fees are off balance sheet because they’re loans. Someone will have to pay out eventually and this is an increasingly, and rightly, becoming a contentious issue.’

‘What stands out to me is that the British universities’ strike does not seem to be part of mainstream society’s concerns, at least not as represented by its media coverage and the conversations one may have in public out and about. It looks like, at least in terms of the public discourse triggered by mainstream media coverage, the UK only has capacity for one or two important issues at a time.’

‘In a ‘Defined Benefit’ (DB) scheme, your employer guarantees you income from retirement till death, based on your contributions. It doesn’t matter how long you’ll live. This is mostly what the university pension, USS, is now. In a ‘Defined Contribution’ (DC) scheme, you get money on your retirement. But if you live longer than you expect, that could run out. If you live fewer years than you expect, your family could inherit what is left over. Universities UK has a new plan to make all pensions ‘DC’. We should call these what they are: ‘Die Quickly’ (DQ) pensions. You’re better off not living into old age, when money runs out. DC means DQ.’

‘Over the past couple of weeks I have had a lot of conversations in corridors with staff in my institution. Very few of them have been explicitly about the strike. What people really want to talk about is workload. That’s because my University, along with many, many other Higher Education Institutions in the UK, has a massive problem.’

Originating at the University of Aberdeen, the movement Reclaiming Our University has written a Manifesto to reclaim the academic world and reshape it in a more communal sense (in our case, the University of Aberdeen). [Free pdf download of the manifesto at the link above]

‘As Stefan Collini puts it, “from being depicted as some kind of anarchist militia bent upon disrupting society while sponging off it, students have come to be regarded as the front-line troops of market forces, storming the walls of those obstructive bastions of pre-commercial values, the universities.”’

‘I am an academic working in a British university, and I am currently on strike. Alongside many of my colleagues – administrators, librarians, lecturers, graduate students – in the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), I am taking industrial action in order to persuade Universities UK (UUK, the body which officially represents Britain’s universities) to commit to meaningful negotiations over the reforms they seek to impose on our pensions scheme (known as the Universities Superannuation Scheme, USS).’

‘The move from a hybrid DB scheme to a DC one (though technically the new scheme would remain a hybrid) moves the risk of volatility in investment performance from the employer to the employee. It significantly reduces the reliability of retirement income forecasts.’

‘In our universities, market-based principles and metrics have been elevated to state-endorsed norms. The resulting dystopias and their symptoms are well described. To complement growing resistance, an alternative vision is required. Here we propose to reclaim our universities based on a plan for The University of the Future. We present a manifesto in which we, the academics, the staff and the students reclaim our places in our universities. We are the universities.’

‘Week 4, and it looks like the combined stupidity of the UUK and lack of preparedness and care by individual University senior leaderships before the current UCU strike action started means that lots of University staff in the UK are still out on strike, not teaching students, not librarian-ing, not providing professional support to researchers, not, public-engaging, and not doing lots of other things they’d rather be doing.’

‘Like most strikes, this one is about much more than money. My favourite banner on the picket line reads “Against the slow cancellation of the future”, a phrase popularised by the late cultural theorist, Mark Fisher. In the grip of neoliberalism, we begin to believe that there is no alternative, Fisher told us.’

‘In a recent piece in The Guardian, Sally Hunt, Director of UCU, ended with a simple but fundamental injunction: we must the case anew for the University as a public good. To an outsider, it may seem odd that she would end a piece about a quite specific issue – the attempted transformation of pensions from a Direct Benefit to Direct Contribution scheme – by making a point about the University as an idea. But it is precisely this sort of connection that so many people are increasingly making and discussing.’